“Judge Rejects Majority Hispanic District in Redistricting Case,” reports FOXNews. The gist: The ruling by District Judge Frank Allen Jr. was a setback for Democrats, who hoped redistricting would give them a better chance at winning a second seat in the U.S. House. Republicans now hold two of the state’s three seats. Democrats argued that New Mexico — with a 42 percent Hispanic population — was due for a majority-Hispanic

“Thirty-one journalists were killed in the line of duty in 2001 and there was a sharp rise in curbs on reporting worldwide,” Reuters is reporting. According to an annual assessment of press freedom by the Paris-based Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) the […] number of journalists jailed or attacked for their work rose dramatically last year.[…] [ …]The number killed was almost the same as in 2000 when the

Sean Penn doesn’t much like FOXNews’ Bill O’Reilly, according to this New York Daily News story. In an interview with Talk Magazine (due out later this week), Penn articulates his distaste for the tough-talkin’ Mr. Bill, the Daily News reports: ‘I’d like to trade O’Reilly for Bin Laden,’ says Penn, calling ‘The No Spin Zone’ author ‘an embraced pariah, that’s what he is.’ And Penn is just getting started on

A pan-arab poll published in Monday’s Saudi Arabian newspaper, Okaz, names Ariel Sharon 2001’s worst human. Not Usama Bin Laden. Not Mullah Omar. Not Yasser Arafat. In second place? Prez Dubya — head of the free and prosperous country whose recent exploits include freeing Afghanistan from tyranny and sending the badly damaged terrorbugs (those that haven’t been killed outright) scurrying into mountain hideaways to tend to their debilitating daisycuts and

Brent Bozell, president of the conservative-leaning Media Research Center, takes on ABC’s Peter Jennings, who recently characterized most Americans as “pretty insular people.” In “Peter’s holiday blues,” Bozell writes: In Peter’s world, ‘patriotism’ is a laudable national spirit of unity, but ‘nationalism’ is that disturbing notion that somehow America leads the world in something; that it’s freer, or richer, or more compassionate than other countries. He’s most alarmed by the

The Media Research Center released its fourteenth annual awards for the year’s worst reporting, the comprehensive “The Best Notable Quotables of 2001.” Roger Ebert gets a thumbs down for this mental nacho burp: George W. Bush was so indifferent to the world that in the years before he became President he mode only two overseas trips, both for business, neither for curiosity. No wonder he wants to break the missile

In his most recent column, John Leo gathers together some of the best lines from 2001, including this observant gem from the writer Joseph Sobran: In one century we went from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to offering remedial English in college. He might have added that in that same century, “history” went from something we made into something that we’ve learned to apologize for…

Reason’s John Pitney Jr. revisits “khaki socialism” in this interesting piece. A taste: When the United States does manage to crush Al Qaeda and its allies, the War on Terror will become part of this refrain. The argument will be that we can solve domestic problems if only we apply national resources as massively and single-mindedly as we did in the military struggle. AFL-CIO President John Sweeney recently told the

North Korea’s ruling party, government, and military newspapers, in a joint editorial, “pledged a ‘do or die’ campaign this year to guard its socialist system against possible attack by the United States and its allies,” this wire story notes. “In a New Year message Tuesday, the Stalinist country also demanded a joint inter-Korean struggle against what it called ‘warhawks’ aggression and acts of military provocation’ by outsiders’: […] The editorial

Writing for The Weekly Standard, Nicole Topham reports on Olympic security for the Salt Lake City games: Officials and terrorism experts have expressed concern about a potential attack on Utah’s stock of chemical munitions, which makes up 44 percent of the nation’s total reserves. But Governor Leavitt insists that state authorities have taken steps to prevent this. Without going into details, officials working to secure the Olympics indicate that their